the “tintern abbey” debate revisited

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Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies30.2 (July 2004): 129-54.

Wordsworth Studies and the Ethics of Criticism:

The Tintern Abbey Debate Revisited

Eric K. W. Yu

National Chiao Tung University

AbstractThis paper raises important questions concerning the ethics of criticism with refer-

ence to Wordsworth scholarship. Reviewing the major critical approaches to Words-worths canonical poem Tintern Abbey, I explore their implications for doing literarycriticism today. I begin with an analysis of the polemics between the New Historicistsand their opponents regarding the defense of and attack on Romantic bardolatry. Then Iinvestigate how the debate has subtly involved such issues as the critics attitudes towardthe author, other critics, and the unprofessional reader, the respect for probable au-thorial intention, and the controversial questions regarding literary value and interpretive

freedom. While applauding the recent greening of Romantic studies for its healthydilution of bardolatry and its emphasis on the contemporary global relevance of criticism,I conclude by pointing out the difficulty of transcending local conflicts, drawing on arecent case concerning the politics of space in the Wye valley.

Keywords

William Wordsworth, ethics of criticism, New Historicism,

ecocriticism, Tintern Abbey

The New Historicist turn of Romantic studies in the 1980s has produced some

fresh interpretations of William Wordsworths poetry. The Leftist obsession with local,

particularly traumatic, historical and economic details which are supposedly suppress-ed in the literary text or denied by its author, however, has also met with strong objec-

tions from scholars of other critical and political allegiances.1 The recent greening

of Romanticism, with its attention to contemporary global environmental issues, poses

an especially noticeable challenge to the New Historicist approach. This essay offers a

critical review of the Tintern Abbey debate, by which is meant the contest between

1 See, for example, Helen Vendler, Kevis Goodman, and Steven Cole respectively.


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the major theoretical approaches to this canonical work by Wordsworth from the mid-

1980s to 2000, with particular attention to the New Historicism and ecocriticism. To

explore the continuing relevance of this debate to us today, I would like to reframe the

polemics concerned in terms of what Tobin Siebers has called the ethics of criti-

cism.2 Literary criticism, by nature, is ethical through and through, because when-

ever we make critical judgments on a text and its author, or weighing relative merits of

rivaling interpretations, such notions as right or wrong, fairness, justice and responsi-

bility are inevitably involved. After the New Historicism, as I will explain, much of

Romantic bardolatry has been ruthlessly undermined, leading us to some sort of ethics

of ambivalence and polyvalence, a critical embarrassment though not necessarily of a

crippling kind. For ecocritics, Romantic ecology is a timely alternative for breaking

the Cold War spell of antagonistic oppositionalism (Kroeber 3), allowing us to shed

the crude old model of Left and Right haunting the New Historicism (Bate, Ro-

mantic Ecology 3). Having assessed the contributions of both New Historicism and

ecocriticism to the ethics of criticism, in the later part of this paper I will explore the

difficulties of greening Romanticism with reference to a concrete case regarding the

politics of space in the Wye valley.

I. The Contentious Business of Historicizing Tintern Abbey

Let me first sketch an important line of development with respect to the ethics of

criticism beginning with the so-called visionary stage of Anglo-American Romantic

studies. By visionary Romanticism I refer to the established Romantic scholarship

consolidated roughly during the 1960s and early 1970s, primarily in North America, by

such influential Romanticists as Northrop Frye, M. H. Abrams, the early Harold Bloom,

and Geoffrey Hartman, marked by the valorization of individual visions, transcenden-tal imagination, and often, but not always, organic unity.3 Underneath the received

2 For more discussion about Sieberss use of the term, see the beginning of section 2 in my present

essay.3 I wish to clarify my usage of visionary Romanticism here. The word visionary does not exactly

mean the same thing to the Romantic writers themselves as to the critics in the second half of the

twentieth century. Coleridge, for example, once praised Brissot, the French Girondin leader executed in

1793, as rather a sublime visionary than a shrewd, Machiavellian politician. See Coleridge 35. In

critics like Frye, the early Bloom, and Hartman, the sense of impracticability remains, but there is a new

emphasis on individualism and aestheticism: the Romantics are seen as visionaries not only because


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wisdom on British Romanticism, there thrives a weighty heritage of Romantic bardol-

atry: the male Romantic poet perceived as a prophet-seer, in possession of extra-

ordinary sensitivity and personal insights, whose work will continue to enlighten the

entire human kind, or at least, in Wordsworths own words, extend the domain of

sensibility for the delight, the honor, and the benefit of human nature (751). There is,

in addition, a constellation of related Romantic ideas such as poetic spontaneity,

originality, the transcendental imagination, and the cult of feelings. The advent of post-

structuralism in the 1970s, it would appear, must have severely undermined Romantic

bardolatry. However, despite all the talk of undecidability and death of the author, a

curious sense of originality and insight is still cherished by the critics most acutely

conscious of linguistic instability and the decentering of the subject.4 The post-

structuralists only need to replace transcendence with linguistic hypersensitivity and

reflexivity, and the Romantic as a clairvoyant prophet-seer having much to teach the

future generations is thus reconfirmed. What has troubled many Wordsworth scholars,

so far as the ethics of criticism is concerned, is perhaps not so much the relatively

short-lived deconstructive turn but the subsequent rise of the New Historicism in the

early 1980s. If the key terms for visionary Romanticists are nature, imagination,

dialectic and transcendence, those for the New Historicists are Napoleonic history,

denial, betrayal and apostasy. The New Historicist vocabulary forcibly reminds us that

this new approach to Romanticism, with its propensity to moral indictments, is anovertly ethical criticism. Whereas Wordsworth in Tintern Abbey is valued in vision-

ary Romanticism for his turn to nature for self-restoration and for a nourishing human

relationship, for the New Historicists he is guilty of renouncing his former revolution-

ary ideals, retreating to the comforts of nature or of solipsism. The standard picture of

Romanticism, argues Jerome McGann, is dominated by a Romantic Ideology, by an

uncritical absorption in Romanticisms self-representations (1). But the accusation of

Romantic ideology in the sense of false consciousness in the Romantic poets and in

they are idealists, but that their visions are individual visions transcending mundane politics, related to

aesthetic contemplation rather than intended for immediate social praxis. The title of Blooms The

Visionary Companyand Hartmans later deconstruction-inspired advocacy of the Revisionary Move-

ment in his Criticism in the Wildernesspaved the way for others to see their earlier work and similar

Anglo-American Romantic scholarships as a visionary movement.4 To the later Hartman, for example, the Romantics like Wordsworth are clairvoyant rather than

blind precursors of later movements that tended to disown them while simplifying the radical character

of their art (Wilderness 47). For Tilottama Rajan, the debate between organicist and deconstructionist

critics over the nature of Romanticism was originally waged by the Romantics themselves and was not

resolved in favor of either side (19).


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the visionary critics as well amounts to an uneasy Oedipal struggle, involving criti-

cal violence and leading to an ineluctable ethical ambivalence.

If by historicizing is simply meant, in the broadest sense, the attention to sty-

listic, linguistic or thematic peculiarities of a literary text and the effort to explain them

by moving beyond the text, extracting relevant cultural, historical and literary back-

ground information in order to situate them, then few of us would object to his-

toricizing per se. The New Historicist imperative of always historiciz[ing] (Jameson

9), nevertheless, has its much narrower meaning, which is implicated in some curious

value orientations, a topic I shall take up in the next section. Suffice it to say at the

outset that different ways of historicizing might lead to utterly contradictory con-

clusions about the poem and its author.

Let me begin with a few concrete examples. With respect to the descriptive style,

curiously, the poem tends toward abstraction at the expense of specific local details. 5

To account for this stylistic peculiarity, an understanding of the eighteenth-century

British tradition of the picturesque will be helpful. Both Nicholas Roe and Colin

Pedley have accounted for the tendency toward abstraction in this poem by reminding

us of the influence of William Gilpins theory of the picturesque, which requires the

idealization of the landscape, trimming the deformities and subduing the human

details of landscape in a remote perspective (Roe 119).6 But for John Barrell, this

abstract vision entails a certain bourgeois ideology, a shying away from the harshreality of social inequities and poverty. Following Barrell, Marjorie Levinson and other

New Historicists accuse Wordsworth of the sin of evading History, in the sense that

he deliberately overlooks the beggars, industry, and tourism in the abbeys environs, if

not also evading the French Revolution. Taking what others might see as a rather

normal stylistic feature, Levinson declares that Wordsworths pastoral prospect is a

fragile affair, artfully assembled by acts of exclusion (Great Period 32). She is in

effect indicting Wordsworth for apostasy, betrayal of his earlier radical ideals and

withdrawal into consoling selfhood. To rescue Wordsworth, Roe draws our attention toa less noticeable detail: even though the poem overlooks and modifies human pres-

ence as picturesque theory required (Great Period126), the literary allusions to Para-

dise Lostand King Learimply no idyllic retreat but the suffering of humanity, echoing

the famous Wordsworthian phrase hearing oftentimes / The still, sad music of human-

5For a more detailed discussion of the descriptive style in Tintern Abbey, see the beginning of

section 4 in my present essay.6 See also Colin Pedley.


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ity (90-91).7 In addition, Roe suggests that the walking tour itself in the 1790s,

because of the conservative political climate, might well be construed [...] as a de-

liberate expression of democratic opinions (128), hence Wordsworths poem is not as

escapist as it might seem.

To further discuss the political implications of the different ways of historicizing

some local details in Tintern Abbey, let us examine the following lines, which appear

to be rather straightforward at first sight:

[...] These pastoral farms,

Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke

Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!

With some uncertain notice, as might seem

Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,

Or of some Hermits cave, where by his fire

The Hermit sits alone. (16-22)

For Roe, the smoke is no more than a pleasing little detail in Wordsworths picturesque

vision of the landscape. Roe tells us that William Gilpins friend Samuel Rogers had

written in his journal some scenic details observed during his Wye journey, which

appear in Tintern Abbey as well. Notable among them are the blue wreaths. InDorothys Alfoxden Journal, too, we find a similar description: a few wreaths of blue

smoke, spreading along the ground (qtd. in Roe 120). Roes move is to persuade us

that Wordsworths description is motivated by the picturesque convention rather than

aiming at crude realism: he might be responding to Dorothys prose rather than his

own immediate observation (120). In a radically different way, Levinson attends also

to the smoke, and to the vagrants and the pastoral farms in the poem. Trying to recover

what is supposedly evaded by the poem, she offers us the following historical thick

description, rich in gloomy details:

In 1798, the Wye Valley, though still affording prospects of great natural

beauty, presented less delightful scenes as well. The region showed

prominent signs of industrial and commercial activity: coal mines, trans-

port barges noisily plying the river, miners hovels. The town of Tintern, a

7 See also Roe 126-27.


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half mile from the Abbey, was an iron-working village of some note, and

in 1798 with the war at full tilt, the works were unusually active. The

forests around Tinterntown and Abbeywere peopled with vagrants,

the casualties of Englands tottering economy and of wartime displace-

ment. Many of these people lived by charcoal burning, obviously a mar-

ginal livelihood. The charcoal was used in the furnaces along the river

banks. The Abbey grounds were crowded with the dispossessed and unem-

ployed, who begged coins of the tourists anxious to exercise their aesthetic

sensibilities. The cottage plots noted in the poem are green to the very

door because the common lands had been enclosed some time back and

the only arable land remaining to the cottager was his front garden. (Great

Period29-30)

I have quoted Levinson at length to demonstrate the heaviness of such New Historicist

historicizing exercises. Some readers facing such a textual explication may indeed

be overwhelmed, perhaps not so much by its sheer weight but because it is hard for

them to perceive the connection between the sordid reality uncovered and the

apparently beautiful verses. At any rate, the depressing view that the vagrant dwell-

ers are desperate paupers, that the smoke comes from the filthy labor of charcoal

burning, and that the green pastoral farms house poor farmers victimized by the en-closure, does not help elucidate the literary value of the poem. We shall return to this

knotty question later. Let us now proceed to the even more controversial figure in the

lines quoted above: the hermit.

Remarking on the picturesque tradition, John Hunt points out that no landscape

garden of the eighteenth century was complete without its hermitage or even its her-

mit (1). The hermit is a conventional symbol of rural retreat and solitary meditation.

For the New Historicists, this figure aptly indicates Wordsworths withdrawal to solip-

sism and goes well with the famous indictment that he lost the world merely to gainhis own immortal soul (McGann 88). However, Damian Davies has discovered one

probable allusion which could save Wordsworth from such charges. In the sixth to

early seventh century, Davies tells us, there lived a king of Gwent and saint known as

Tewdrig the Blessed, who had abandoned his rulership and retired to Tintern. Faced

with a Saxon invasion, nonetheless, he was called out of his hermitage and died as a

patriotic war hero. Noting that Wordsworth might have read about Tewdrig before he

wrote Tintern Abbey, Davies contends that the hermit allusion, instead of implying


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solitary retreat, actually embodies political duty and the still, sad music of human-

ity mentioned in Tintern Abbey (424). So the excavation of a seemingly trivial

historical detail might, if surprisingly, turn an interpretation of the poem upside down.

The angry responses aroused by New Historicist and related feminist and Marxist

readings in the Tintern Abbey debate, in retrospective, have a great deal to do with

the apparent Leftist attack on Romantic bardolatry with its attendant assumptions

about the poet as prophet-seer, the lasting universal relevance of the poem, and the role

of the critic as the defender rather than apostate of seemingly endangered Romantic

values such as the cult of feelings, the obsession with personal growth, and the belief

in transcendence, values which appear to be hopelessly dated in an age of poststruc-

turalism, postmodernism and postcolonialism. The word assaults in the title of Helen

Vendlers Tintern Abbey: Two Assaults is quite telling. For Vendler, Levinsons

accusation of Wordsworths evasion of history is absolutely unjust, sadly betraying that

a New Historicist like her has never found anything to like in the poem (178), a

pathetic blindness to the obvious lyrical dimension of the poem. The second major

assault on the poem and its author, as Vendler sees it, comes from Barrells feminist-

deconstructionist reading. Having recourse to John Locke and David Hartley, Barrell

distinguishes between two kinds of language: the literal language of the sense (153)

and the figural, or meditative and contemplative language (156-57). Reading

Tintern Abbey, Barrell claims that there is an opposition between Dorothys andWordsworths former experience of nature as wild ecstasies and Wordsworths

present mature meditation on nature, corresponding to the distinction between the

primitive and the philosophic languages mentioned above. For Barrell, although the

philosophic language seems to be the higher form of the two in the hierarchy, actually

there is a curious dependence. In Wordsworths case, the language of the sense, as

presently employed by Dorothy, stands as a present and audible guarantee of the

meanings in his own language of the intellect; it assures him of the secure foundation

of his language in the language of the sense (164). Analogically, he needs to believethat Dorothy will grow up and sober up, for by doing so she will naturalize and

legitimate his own loss of immediate pleasure in nature (164). But, Barrell argues,

Dorothy can perform these two functions, only if her potential for intellectual growth

is acknowledged, but only if, also, that potential is never actualized (164). Para-

doxically, she must be acknowledged as capable of growing up but she is not allow-

ed to grow up: she must [...] remain a child, if she is to remain a nurse; and she must


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statements in John Thelwalls The Rights of Nature, reminding us that Thelwall, a

radical British intellectual, was struggling in the late 1790s to retain his political com-

mitment (212). For Thelwall, in order to fight for British freedom one must first

recover from despairs, to feel the importance of persevering fortitude and be equip-

ped with a generous confidence and unanimity (qtd. in Richey 212). Richeys is ap-

parently a red rewriting of Hartmans earlier view that Wordsworths poetry looks

back in order to look forward the better (Wordsworths Poetry 28-29). The final

paragraph of Tintern Abbey, in this light, is not escapist but a rededication to hu-

manitarian concerns (Richey 212). Furthermore, there is some similarity between the

description of Dorothys future solitude and the treatment of the vagrant in The Old

Cumberland Beggar, another poem collected in Lyrical Ballads, where the poet also

recommends the healing power of nature. The subtle link between Dorothy and the

vagrant, for Richey, is a testimony of Wordsworths unwavering social commitment.

The second line of defense, against the charge of Wordsworths alleged selfish

exploitation of Dorothy, can be found in Richey, James Soderholm, Raymond Powell,

and most recently, Heidi Thomson.9 Soderholm reminds us that, while some recent

critics tend to see only solipsism, narcissism and patriarchism in Wordsworths apos-

trophic evocation of Dorothy in the poem, early critics thought of the turn to [her] as a

kind-hearted gesture and a socializing of the poets private myth of memory (314).

Bound by their hermeneutics of suspicion and obsessed with betrayals, occlusions,and distances, unsympathetic critics fail to see the genuine, intimate relations between

the brother and sister (314). Powell argues that it is through Dorothys journals, as

well as through her own example, that Wordsworth has learnt how to see the world

afresh (690). As Wordsworth clearly expresses in his poem The Sparrows Nest,

Dorothy has long sustained him through loving cares and teaching him to appreciate

nature. However, even granted that the love between Wordsworth and Dorothy was

genuine and reciprocal, Barrells and others feminist critique that during the Romantic

Period there was obvious inequity between man and woman in terms of poetic poweris still hard to deny. Dorothy is not exactly given a voice in the poem; she merely

stands as the passive object receiving Wordsworths sermon and blessing. And it is,

after all, Wordsworth who could become a poet laureate, not the writer of the Grasmere

journals. To defend Wordsworth, one often finds it necessary to stress on the reciprocal

9 Of this particular aspect of the Tintern Abbey debate, my discussion concludes roughly by the

mid-1990s. For an update of more recent interpretations regarding the address to Dorothy in the poem,

see Heidi Thomson.


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relation between the brother and sister, and to take Dorothy as the representation of

human community. For Richey, the last verse paragraph of Tintern Abbey is marked

by a sense of reciprocity, for Wordsworth continually weaves together the fates of

himself and his sister, even as he imagines their separation (215). Richey also reminds

us of the sufferings which both the brother and the sister have gone through in their

younger days, their separation and orphan-like existence. The ending of the poem is

thus like two orphans making a compact with one another, a social contract as it

were (215). Hence what we see is a communal moment, which prevents Words-

worth from falling into an abyss of idealism (216). Likewise, Thomson stresses on

the idea of sharing, highlighting the friendship and the sibling relationship between

Wordsworth and Dorothy instead of gender politics and narcissistic projection (542).

The New Historicists might well question if Dorothy could indeed represent a com-

munity of all the vagrants, laborers, and the rural poor like Michael, yet they cannot

deny Richeys claim that Wordsworth is preparing to return to society, as to be con-

firmed by his Poems Dedicated to National Independence and Liberty, composed

since 1802, and by his attempt to publish the political tract The Convention of Cintrain

1808 and 1809. Curiously, often the New Historicists would emphasize Wordsworths

inner turn as the suppression of the social, ignoring his visibly active life after the

apostasy, a successful career crowned with his international fame as a national bard

and the most prominent among the Big Six of British Romantic poets.

II. Ambivalence, Rightfulness and Relevance:

Aspects of the Ethics of Criticism

My discussion of the Tintern Abbey debate, up to this point, might have re-

sembled a melodrama of defending and rescuing the author. Actually, more subtleethical problems of criticism have been involved. The conflict of interpretations, as

Siebers persuasively argues, is always implicated in ethical questions. The ethics of

criticism encompasses our critical attitudes towards the author and other critics as well

as the attitudes engendered either consciously or unconsciously by particular theo-

retical stances (Siebers 2). To put it most bluntly, there is a deep ambivalence in the

New Historicist stance toward canonical writers like Wordsworth and their works. To

one extreme, there is a keen sense of the critics superiority verging on aggressiveness:


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the belief that one can transcend ideology, prescribe what the poet should or should not

have written and see what the poet himself or herself fails to see. On the other pole are

intricate apologies for studying the text and its author, both having been identified as

morally suspect. Let me take McGanns famous work The Romantic Ideology as an

example, a book which has gained much recognition as the manifesto of New

Historicist Romantic studies. Reading Tintern Abbey, McGann claims that between

1793 and 1798, the famous five years mentioned at the beginning of the poem,

Wordsworth lost the world merely to gain his own immortal soul (88). At the same

time, he announces that the critique of Wordsworths Romantic ideology as false

consciousness and of his apostasy is not an indictment of the poems greatness (90).

To follow the familiar logic of Romantic bardolatry, however, one is immediately

confronted with an obvious contradiction. Can we, in short, belittle a prophet-seers

thoughts while preserving the value of his work? As if to answer this difficult question,

McGann explains that the greatness of the poem lies in the clarity and candor with

which it dramatizes not merely this event [of displacing harsh social reality], but the

structure of this event (88). And yet earlier on he also says that most readers have

simply passed by the historical allusions in the poem almost without notice (86). If

the average reader does not recognize such allusions, one would ask, how can we

claim that the poem is great because of its alleged clarity and candor in dramatizing

the unperceived structure of displacement? Drawing on Levinsons polemical essayInsight and Oversight: A Reading of Tintern Abbey, McGann has dropped us some

hints. He writes that the force of lines 15-23 depends upon our knowing that the

ruined abbey had been in the 1790s a favorite haunt of transients and displaced

personsof beggars and vagrants of various sorts (86). He seems to be suggesting, in

effect, that the startling [...] contrast of social conditions, on this reading, accounts

precisely for the poems power. In other words, one way to appreciate the poems

impact necessitates some minimal local knowledge aided by a certain symptomatic

reading procedure, which enables the return of the repressed. And it is exactly becausethe average reader is unable to see the hidden History that the New Historicist inter-

vention is much needed. A sense of critical hubris, arguably, goes with a self-serving

move. The New Historicists have offended other Romanticists not only because they

refuse to play the humble servants of the great Romantics, but they have also devalued

visionary interpretations as nave and complicit with a false consciousness, hence

equally guilty of the suppression of the social. This raises the further ethical question

as to whether the critical violence against more traditional-minded critics, and, by


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extension, the average, ignorant, reader, is well justified.

Although there is an unmistakable obsession with the overtly public and political

in the New Historicist approach to the Romantic canon, it would be wrong to allege

that the New Historicists are always blind to the aesthetic dimension of the text and try

to evade the question of literary value altogether. Levinsons detailed analysis of

Peele Castle in her Wordsworths Great Period Poems tries to explain why so

formulaic a poem [is] so moving and why this decidedly anomalous work [is]

regarded as central to the canon (103). She has taken pains to explicate how the

faade of serene control evinced by the narrator actually goes with a sublime lan-

guage which works with a cruel perseverance to discredit the manifest themes of the

elegy and to disorder its thought (103). She further hints that the force of the poem

comes from its strangely redundant energy, and seeks to explain its dynamics in

terms of social contradiction and ideological necessity (103).

David Simpsons book Wordsworths Historical Imaginationis an even better case

in point, where he is exceptionally conscious of the need to explain what accounts for

the greatness or main interest of Wordsworths poetry, albeit from a rather peculiar

perspective. He states in his introduction that it is most productive to regard the

Wordsworthian subjectivity as a particular medium [...] that was, by virtue of its open-

ness to the energies of language and experience, extraordinarily articulate about the

pressures and tensions that we may with hindsight regard as central to the culture atlarge (4). Simpson tries to develop, in a way symptomatic and sympathetic at once,

what the early Hartman has referred to as Wordsworths poetics of error in an

expressly social direction. He is able to tell us what is interestingabout Wordsworths

works: the complexity of thematic and psychological conflicts, the tensions, uncer-

tainties, and displacements underlying what others might have dismissed hastily as

mere Romantic ideology, self-deception or bad faith. At the same time, Simpson also

appeals to the notion of representativeness, presumably to account for Wordsworths

greatness: Wordsworths articulation of these tensions and anxieties takes place in alanguage that so fully images and alludes to the public and political dimension that it

becomes profoundly representative (4). Whether this yoking of a psychoanalytic-

poststructuralist insight with a classic Marxist-realist imperative amounts to a missal-

liance invites further examination. Reading Tintern Abbey, Simpson focuses on the

tensions and doubts, rather than speculating on evasions and betrayals. Attending to the

poetic language, Simpson highlights its negativity and tentativeness. He recognizes

two redemptive prospects intimated at the end of the poem, a recourse to nature and


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the language of the sense (112), and the final turn toward the desperately limited

version of the social world represented by Dorothy (113). Unlike most visionary

Romanticists, Simpson stresses that Tintern Abbey is a poem of aspiration rather

than achievement:

The conviction of particular passages is unsettled by their contiguity to

other passages, and by the general rhetoric of hypothesis. We see here

neither the successful displacement of the social by the natural, nor the

convincing subsumption of the natural within the social. On the contrary,

the poem transcribes the speakers sense of reciprocal instability of both

social and natural environments. (113)

This reading is a negation of the famous Wordsworthian dictum love of nature leading

to love of mankind and, at the same time, a qualification of McGanns and Levinsons

rather patronizing New Historicist critique. The portrait of the Romantic as a prophet-

seer in full control of his meaning, at any rate, has already been tainted; instead of a

eulogy of vision and achievement, we are to be content with unfulfilled yearnings. The

simultaneous invocation of socio-linguistic representativeness and a peculiar poetics

of error, coupled with the not unromantic rhetoric of sympathy in the critic,

intimates a convoluted ethics of ambivalence and polyvalence.Apart from raising the question of how to judge the authors moral character fairly,

the Tintern Abbey debate has also alerted us to a somewhat different, though ulti-

mately connected, dimension of the ethics of criticism: what makes a good or right

interpretation of the text? Or, in an alternative formulation, what criteria should we

adopt when weighing the relative merit or soundness of rival readings of the same

poem? Could they be, to follow the hermeneutical tradition, logical consistency of

arguments, sufficiency of supports, comprehensive coverage of the text, faithfulness to

authorial intention,

10

or, to accommodate more recent trends, novelty of interpreta-tion, theoretical sophistication, and social relevance? A closely related methodological

consideration: what is to be counted as in the text? Can one which dwells on what is

10 I have in mind particularly E. D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation. More philosophical discussions

can be found in Paul Ricoeurs prolific writings. The advent of deconstruction has certainly complicated

the problematics of interpretation, a huge topic not discussed in any detail in my present essay. Insofar

as judging the relative merit of different interpretations involves the notions of goodness and justice,

and that such judgements are often related to moral judgements on the author, I include, if somewhat

unconventionally, rightfulness in interpretation in my discussion of the ethics of criticism.


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seemingly outside of the poem be a valid reading? How far should authorial inten-

tion, granted that it is indeed knowable, serve as the anchor of the meaning of the

text? Two notable features of the New Historicism, in this regard, are the propensity

for absence and the subtle reliance on authorial intention at the same time. In the

words of Alan Liu, what is there in a poem is precisely what is not there: all the

history that has been displaced, erased, suppressed, elided, overlooked, overwritten,

omitted, obscured, expunged, repudiated, excluded, annihilated, and denied (556).

This approach already presupposes the possibilities of securing some sort of inten-

tionality in the text and recuperating what Levinson calls the objective Real in

history (Liu 561). One has to ascertain to what historical reality the poem must be

alluding in order to claim that the author willfully suppresses or, by virtue of some

psychological defense mechanisms, unwittingly displaces such a reality. Curiously,

despite the influence of deconstruction on some of its advocates, the New Historicist

enterprise as a whole seems to be rather indifferent to such poststructuralist notions as

undecidability and the decentering of the self, as if questioning historical certainty and

undermining the more or less unified self would weaken the force of such moral

indictments as the authors betrayal, disavowal and bad faith. With reference to the

theoretical difficulty of transcending Romantic ideology, Steven Cole has aptly

commented that the New Historicists can hardly get from the ontological argument

about social determination to the normative argument which is required in order todistinguish between truth and falsity, that the very description of falsity presup-

poses the kind of free agency which historicism wants to deny, since a belief can be

false only if one had a choice to believe differently (42). In what follows, I would

like to shift the focus to the problems with New Historicist contextualization in

relation to authorial intention and to the ontological question of what is to be con-

sidered in the text.

Reading Peele Castle in terms of Napoleonic political history, Levinson tries

to associate the death of John Wordsworth with the deaths of Marat, Robespierre,John Taylor, and Raisley Cavert, and insists that Wordsworth does not draw the

arrow leading from private grief to public critique, because he does not, he cannot

know this connection (Great Period 12). She further claims: Could Wordsworth

have discovered the subtext of his poemthe associative logic whereby a devouring,

autonomous Imagination is demonically doubled in the figure of Napoleonhe would

have been in a position to connect the immediate occasion of Peele Castle with the

disproportionate repercussions of that tragedy (Great Period 123). A question we


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might ask is how the modern critic could be so sure of such unsaids. In response to

Levinsons conviction about the weightiness of political history over merely personal

experience, Thomas McFarland argues persuasively that we can hardly overestimate

the personal depth of Wordsworths grief at his brothers loss, for that grief has

engendered not only this particular poem but also at least five more extraordinarily

affecting poetic works (30). Obsessed with the political import of Wordsworths

sufferings, Levinson overlooks his more probable grief at the death of his own mother

and father as well (McFarland 29).

As for Tintern Abbey, in order to explore possible political allusions there,

Levinson stresses that July 13, 1798 in the title marked almost to the day the nine-

year anniversary of the original Bastille Day and the five-year anniversary of the

murder of Marat (Great Period 16). McFarland ponders on this interesting near-

miss:

It is impressive that the date is the fifth anniversary of Marats murder, but

then what do we make of the fact that it was Robespierres, not Marats,

death that sent Wordsworth into paroxysms of joy and thankfulness? That

13 July 1798 marked almost to the day the nine-year anniversary of the

original Bastille Day is also intriguing, but it would have been vastly, even

exponentially, more intriguing had that Bastille moment actually been 13July, and not, forever and eternally, 14 July. To what extent does a near

miss qualify for parapractic use? And is nine years as good as ten? (4)

What he has raised, in effect, is a host of thorny problems about rightfulness in inter-

pretationthe critical license of diverging from probable authorial intention, the ap-

propriation of arguably irrelevant information outside the literary text, and the le-

gitimacy of the critics claim to a superior knowledge denied to the author, to say the

least. Full answers to these difficult questions, unfortunately, lie beyond the scope ofthe present study.

III. Ecocriticism and Social Relevance

The recent greening of British Romanticism has thrown the problem of social


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relevance into even sharper relief. If the New Historicist excavation of traumatic his-

tory is a longing to fix the meaning of the text in terms of historical specificities even

at the cost of sacrificing probable authorial intention, then recent ecocriticism can be

seen as a daring move to go beyond the confines of biography, history, and geography

in search of some contemporary global, environmental relevance. Jonathan Bate is

most eloquent in his introduction to Romantic Ecology, where he reminds us of the

demolition of the Berlin Wall and the anachronism of the crude old model of Left and

Right (3), announcing the timeliness of greening:

The 1960s gave us an idealist reading of Romanticism which was impli-

citly bourgeois in its privileging of the individual imagination; the 1980s

gave us a post-Althusserian Marxist critique of Romanticism. The first of

these readings assumed that the human mind is superior to nature; the

second assumed that the economy of human society is more important

than [...] the economy of nature. It is precisely these assumptions that

are now being questioned by green politics. (9)

For Bate, as for Karl Kroeber, a green approach to literary texts by such Romantic

writers as Wordsworth is valid because they harbor some kind of proto-ecological

views. More importantly, the greening of Romantic poems affords them strong con-temporary social relevance, for it brings Romanticism to bear on what are likely to be

some of the most pressing political issues of the coming decade: the greenhouse effect

and the depletion of the ozone layer, the destruction of the tropical rainforest, acid rain,

the pollution of the sea [...] (Bate, Romantic Ecology 9). So far as the pragmatic

effects of literary criticism are concerned, Bate contends that the New Historicisms

potential for wider political use [...] outside the academy is very limited, whereas

Romantic ecology serves much better to politicize Romanticism [...] in a way that

speaks to our present discontents (8). One would not be surprised, therefore, to findsuch modern ecological concepts as ecosystem, sustainable productivity and the

Gaia hypothesis figuring prominently in Bates recent reading of Tintern Abbey in

The Song of the Earth, notions which are becoming increasingly familiar to us but

would strike Wordsworth as rather alien. In Bates reading, Tintern Abbey celebrates

a cottage-economy which does not disturb the ecosystem; Wordsworths well-

known pantheism is rewritten as the view that the whole earth is a single vast,

living, breathing ecosystem (Song of the Earth 146). In James McKusicks similar


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reading of the poem, we have the oft-quoted lines These hedge-rows, hardly

hedge-rows, little lines / Of sportive wood run wild (15-16) discussed with reference

to the preservation of biodiversity rather than to the picturesque gaze or the en-

closure of common fields (67). The clear statement in the poem that nature is The

anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, / The guide, the guardian of my heart, and

soul / Of all my moral being (109-11) has been displaced. The appeal to probable

authorial intention, in short, has already given way to contemporary social relevance.

Even if Wordsworth is still lauded as the High Priest of nature, nature itself is now

more likely to be seen in terms of ecosystems rather than as a mystic god-like presence.

Interestingly, while Bates reading of Wordsworth, having recourse to contemporary

ecological discourse, foregrounds the global relevance of Wordsworths poetry, he has

to emphasize regional specificity in Wordsworths nature poems in order to argue

that his patriotism is rooted in a tradition of local defence of liberty rather than being

knee-jerk jingoism (Song of the Earth219, 215). Wordsworths critical regional-

ism, Bate tries to convince us, is opposed to a Napoleonic, expansionist imperial-

ism with an investment in the denigration and even extinction of other countries

(Song of the Earth225). Let me return to the important issue of the global versus the

local in the next section and proceed immediately to other difficulties of greening

Romanticism.

The ethical imperative to respect nature and other living organisms, for example,does not exempt the critic from the need to identify literary value in Tintern Abbey;

taking how close a poem conforms to some environmental ethics as the measure of its

very greatness will not do. In other words, neither Aldo Leopolds land ethic nor

Paul Taylors biocentric outlook on nature, nor yet Naess and Sessionss deep

ecology platform can be readily translated into an ethic of literary criticism. The con-

viction that a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty

of the biotic community (Leopold 253), for instance, does not automatically guarantee

that a literary work is great when it celebrates the integrity, stability, and beauty of thebiotic community. With respect to the tradition of Romantic bardolatry, merely

proving Wordsworth is one of the important precursors of environmentalism could

hardly sustain his status as a prophet-seer knowing much to teach the future gener-

ations. Moreover, the borrowing of the modern ecological discourse, often burdened

with a technical, if not materialistic, lexicon, may be at odds with the humanist and

quasi-theological heritage of Romanticism long familiar to us. The green reverence for

alllife forms, from the tiniest insects upward to the humans, is potentially leveling. If


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146

we are to follow the deep ecologists, we are obliged to censure anthropocentrism and

to forfeit much of Romantic hero worship, which is of course deeply and unapologetic-

cally anthropocentric. Methodologically, a few of Wordsworths pieces like Nutting

are ideally suited for a green reading,11 yet others like Tintern Abbey pose acute

interpretive problems.

The Tintern Abbey debate has highlighted a few highly controversial textual

and thematic peculiarities, such as the palpable absence of the abbey, the less notice-

able evasion of industry in the environs, and the role of Dorothy vis--vis Words-

worth and nature. To further explore the ethics of criticism in regard to Romantic

ecology, let me return to Bates green reading of Tintern Abbey in The Song of the

Earthand examine how he counters earlier negative criticism of the poem and renders

Wordsworth into an exemplary ecopoet. Bates move is double-edged. On the one

hand, Bate tries to save Wordsworth from New Historicist and feminist attacks on his

moral character; on the other, he expounds Wordsworths ecopoesis by linking his

linguistic style to an environmental ethic, thus explaining, presumably, the literary

value of the poem. Bate sees Tintern Abbey as a subtle critique of the picturesque

tradition popularized by Gilpin, with its anthropocentric re-envisioning of nature as art

and its taste for ruins. Raymond Williams, one might still remember, has criticized the

conspicuous aesthetic consumption of the wild regions of mountain and forest as

objects by the leisurely picturesque tourist, whose journeys came from the profits ofan improving agriculture and from trade (128). Bate adds that Wordsworths pos-

turing of the picturesque reflects the Cartesian division of the mind from the body

(Song of the Earth 141). The absence of the abbey from the poem is explained as a

refusal to accept the picturesque assumption that artificial features such as ruins [...]

may be classed as part of nature (144). Bates also suggests, intriguingly, that Words-

worth has anticipated Adornos recognition that a taste for the picturesque ruins is

likely to be imbued with reactionary politics (144). Evading the abbey, he is thus able

to free the poem of the conservative, imperialist kind of nationalism. Citing GilpinsObservations on the River Wye, Bate reminds us that Gilpin noted with surprise and

delight that within half a mile of the site of the abbey there were great ironworks, but

without any awareness of the environmental effects of mining and industry (143).

For the picturesque tourist, Bate argues forcefully, impressive new industrial sites

were objects of admiration just as much as ancient ruins and imposing cliffs (143).

11 For a good discussion, see Ralph Pite, particularly 368-73, for his green explication of Nutting.


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knotty questions I have raised with reference to different approaches to Tintern Ab-

bey, but it has made at least two significant contributions to our discussion of the

ethics of criticism. First, the environmental ethics, with its leanings toward equity and

tolerance, implies a dilution of Romantic bardolatry but perhaps also, if somewhat

paradoxically, a healthy respect for the author. Second, Romantic ecology, as opposed

to the New Historicist obsession with local, traumatic political and economic histories,

prioritizes contemporary global relevance of criticism and seems to have paved the

way toward a greater freedom of reading.

IV. The Local and the Global: Reading Tintern Abbey Today

In what follows, I would like to shift our discussion gradually to the politics of

space in light of the recent scholarship of Doreen Massey and Pat Jess. I wish to

demonstrate that ecocriticism, with its propensity to the universal or global, has yet to

wrestle with some thorny problems on the local scene, if contemporary social rele-

vance must be duly respected. Stylistically, the most remarkable feature of Tintern

Abbey is perhaps its obvious lack of local color so far as descriptive details are con-

cerned, in stark contrast to the attention to local flora and fauna one finds in JohnClares poetry. The full title does specify the date and location of the revisit (Lines

Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye

during a Tour, July 13, 1798), which has been open to a great deal of New Historicist

political speculation. Despite the frequent use of the deictic expressions like this,

these, and that, the poem itself proceeds with mostly general descriptions: the

steep and lofty cliffs, the quiet of the sky, the hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows,

the delightful stream, and the beauteous forms ill-defined (5, 8, 15, 150, 23). The

abbey is not depicted at all, while the River Wye is transformed through mythologicalassociation into a nymph, wanderer thro the woods (56). Nor are the emotions given

concrete contents: unremembered pleasure, that serene and blessed mood, arch-

ing joys, and dizzy raptures (31, 41, 84, 85) are all rather vague. Even the most

concrete descriptions like evil tongues, rash judgments, the sneers of selfish

men, and the dreary intercourse of daily life (128-31), it would seem, bear no

marked cultural specificities. Although the final part of the poem is addressed to

Dorothy, the poets sister, the reader does not need to know much about her to


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appreciate his finding in her wild eyes his former self and the wish that this green

pastoral landscape (119, 158) will bless her even at his absence. In short, minimal

knowledge about the Wordsworths lives or the history of the locale is presumed in the

reader. Given the global character of the poem, no wonder earlier critics from Keats

to Abrams often read it with reference to general notions like nature and subjectivity,

or to such universal human concerns as sufferings and hopes.12

However, the picture is inevitably complicated if we, while reading Tintern

Abbey, attend also to the recent struggle between some local residents in the Wye

valley and the newcomers who apparently champion the cause of environmentalism.

The conflicts between local farmers and a group of writers, artists and musicians there

can be traced back to the early 1990s. In 1993, When Bob and Cilla Greenland, a local

couple, planned to turn the fifteenth century Pilstone Farm into a farm for tourists,

selling locally raised lamb and pork, with a restaurant, craft shop and [...] car park

(Dunn 137), they were confronted by a media campaign against their project. To the

more educated newcomers to the Wye, the place is one of the last pastoral paradises

which must be guarded against any form of development. As with Wordsworth, they

are attracted by the place because they see it as one of seclusion and spiritual

restoration. Interestingly, apart from this artistic colony of new settlers, some cam-

paigners at the time were obvious outsiders who opposed the change simply because

they cherished some environmentalist ideals. In the words of Bob Greenland:

Some of the people complaining hadnt even seen the place [...]. They

described it as an unspoiled 15th-century farmhouse when half of its a

rather hideous modern building which we want to improve. They quoted

Wordsworth when once the Wye Valley was highly-industrialised with

iron works, charcoal works, all sorts of things. Its now a major tourist

12 In his monumental study Wordsworths Poetry, Hartman puts forth the famous via naturaliter

negativa thesis, claiming that nature plays an essential though self-transcending role in Words-worths unsteady growth into self-consciousness (xiii, xvi). Aided by nature, Wordsworth ultimately

goes beyond nature to gain unviolent regeneration of his soul (30). The early Harold Bloom, with a

less solipsistic emphasis, focuses on the benign principle of reciprocity between the external world and

[the] mind (132) and the personal myth of memory as salvation (140). Despite his misgivings and

the ultimate fear of mortality, Wordsworth, through memories of Natures presence, which offer him

serenity and affection, is able to maintain his faith (140). Abrams reiterated in the 1980s in a similar vein

that Tintern Abbey is a lyric meditation on what it generally is for a human being to grow older and,

inevitably, to experience vicissitude, disappointment, and dismay, as John Keats had also recognized

(384). These interpretations offer us a general picture of healing, human relationship and the belief in

nature, and have been seen by some critics as a legacy of comfort.


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area [...]. (qtd. in Dunn 138)

What Greenland is arguing here, in effect, is that the Wye valley was no longer an idyll

even before William and Dorothy Wordsworth came there in 1798 as some kind of

picturesque tourists looking for wild secluded scenes (6), supposedly to lighten

the heavy and the weary weight / Of all this unintelligible world (137).13 This is by

no means to deny that, for worshipper[s] of Nature (152), this green pastoral

landscape can help sustain their cheerful faith in nature as the guide, the guardian

of [their] heart, and soul / Of all [their] moral being[s] (110-11) and restore their

spiritual health. The new question being raised is how much we must respect local

inhabitants different conception of the place and, when their livelihood might be at

stake, whether we should grant them more rights to the place.

For Massey and Jess, Pilstone farm is an ironic case. Contrary to the classic

example of the local people resisting the influence of the global process of moderni-

zation, here the proposed new development is not a very modern one (farm for tourists)

and the opponents are either privileged new settlers or utter outsiders. Those who

hold a more mundane view of the place earn their livings locally, either in tourist-

orientated businesses or through farming (Jess and Massey 139), while the Ro-

mantic new settlers or occasional visitors might have constructed the idyllic image of

the place elsewhere, perhaps when reading Tintern Abbey. As Massey and Jesscontend, the view of this local area as quiet, secluded, contemplation of nature is

constructed and claimed by non-locals out of their own very present reasons for being

there and (perhaps) an intermittent, or a selective, interpretation of history, and this

Romantic view works by denying the current locals perhaps more realistic view of the

place as a mixture of tourism and farming (140). Ironically, a form of anthropo-

centrism with an arguably exclusionist leaning could be found in the professed

supporters of environmentalism. What this case has starkly demonstrated is that eco-

criticism cannot always transcend contemporary local struggles: a well-intentionedgreen way of reading Wordsworth might be enmeshed in a politics of representation

and be perceived as oppressive to some people whose lives are, in a sense, much closer

to nature. For green Wordsworth scholars, it is not as easy as it might seem at first

sight to take sides, having in mind Wordsworths own apparent sympathy for

13 William first visited the Wye valley and Tintern Abbey alone in 1793. He revisited the place with

Dorothy in 1798, beginning their four-day ramble through the Wye valley from Bristol (Curtis 112).


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peasants.14

If visionary Romanticism has been accused of evading the harsh reality of

social conflicts, much the same thing can be said of the popular kind of ecocriticism

immensely influenced by deep ecology and the wilderness movement, which concerns

itself primarily with the change in attitude toward nature or personal choices regarding

lifestyle in a post-industrial consumer society. A more thoroughgoing environmental-

ism, Ramachandra Guha and J. Martinez-Alier suggest, must directly challenge

Western systems of production or distribution, questioning its socio-ecological

basis (18).15 Green thoughts, in this light, need not preclude traditional red con-

cerns. With this in mind, while celebrating sustainable productivity of the pastoral

farms and environmentally-friendly vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods in

Tintern Abbey with Bate, we should not completely forget that the vagrants we now

romanticize are also victims of some dark social forces. So far our critical review has

raised a number of difficult questions concerning the practice of criticism which are

still highly relevant today. My purpose is not to point out the theoretical weaknesses

of each critical approach to the poem but to demonstrate the very complexity of the

ethical questions involved. Having reframed the acrimonious Tintern Abbey debate

in terms of the ethics of criticism, I hope further dialogues will be opened and in

fruitful ways.

Works Cited

14 I am by no means arguing that the Greenlands are indeed as poor and helpless as people like

Michael in Wordsworths poetry. My focus here is the rights to a place. In the third world context, on the

other hand, the gap between the champions of Western-style environmentalism and the rustic poor, in

terms of cultural and economic power, is obviously much more obvious, as is apparent in RamachandraGuha and J. Martinez-Aliers analysis.

15 To be exact, the main focus of Guha and Martinex-Alieris not social inequities in the West but the

environmentalists general oversight of Western capitalisms exploitation of the third world, its e-

normous dependence on the lands, peoples and resources of other parts of the globe (18). To envision a

better world, the lopsided emphasis on the protection of pristine, unspoilt nature as a reservoir of

biological diversity and enormous aesthetic appeal which serves as an ideal (if temporary) haven from

the urban workaday world (20) is not enough. Invoking Guha and Martinex-Aliers third world

critique here, however, I only wish to stress that ecocriticism does not necessarily go against traditional

Leftist concerns. We have yet to see how green and red interpretations of the poem might be synthe-

sized.


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30.2 (july 2004)

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